A survey of PHP developers has identified mobile, social media, cloud and big data as the key areas developers say they’ll be working on in the coming year.

The survey, Zend Developer Pulse, was carried out by PHP specialists Zend Technologies in November, and responses were gathered from 3,335 developers.

According to the survey report, 66 percent of developers say they’ll be working on mobile apps in the coming year, and between 40 and 50 percent of developers say they’ll have projects in each of cloud, social media integration, big data/analytics, and producing APIs.

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Asked which cloud environment they plan on using, Amazon came out highest by far at 30 percent, with Rackspace at 10 percent and Azure at 6 percent trailing well behind. Perhaps equally interesting were the 28 percent who don’t yet know which cloud to go for, so while Amazon is miles in front, there’s still room for rivals to improve.

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 According to the survey report, more than 50 percent of enterprise developers and more than 65 percent of SMB developers surveyed report spending more than half of their time working in PHP. However, as Tim Anderson commented in his ITWriting blog, the original invite to take part in the survey said it was ‘taking the pulse of PHP developers’, so this particular result is hardly surprising.

The survey also asked which other languages the developers used in addition to PHP. The language with the highest percentage was JavaScript, coming in at 82 percent, with Java on 24 percent, C/C++ at 17 percent, C# at 15 percent, Python at 11 percent, VB.NET at 8 percent, and Ruby at 6 percent.

Perhaps the most enlightening question asked what New Year’s Resolutions the developers planned to make. Coming in joint top were "take a vacation" and "spend more time with my family", both on 19 percent; 18 percent planned to eat more healthily - cutting down on coding fuelled by pizza. The next highest option, favoured by 12 percent of respondents was to get application documentation done.

More Information

Zend Developer Pulse Q4 2011

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